...Just last week, the Democrats’ communications director said he wanted to kill Chris Christie dead. Were it the communications director of the GOP saying that about Hillary Clinton, we would be in the second week of news stories about the outrage. News networks would have daily coverage of Democrats getting threatened....

The biases are not just in what is covered, but in how much it is covered and where the coverage happens in the paper and in the segment placement and whether something is treated as claimed or true. Outrage over Republicans is always disproportionately higher. Republican statements are treated as claims and Democrat statements are treated as facts. It is not always intentional per se, but is always a reflection of the world view of those packaging the news. They view the tea party and conservatives as more disruptive, more malcontented, and more prone to bad behavior. So they focus on that as it conforms to a pre-conceived narrative....

If the press has no intention of being fair, don’t expect the rest of us to be.

According to the state legislature’s fact sheet, there are only two provisions to the bill:

Prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the President of the U.S. that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.

Prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with a policy directive issued by the U.S. DOJ to law enforcement agencies in this state that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.

The party controlling the White House almost always loses down the ballot, especially for a two-term president, according to Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

But under Obama, Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats, 69 U.S. House seats and 13 U.S. senate seats, all the most since World War II. Democrats also have lost 11 governorships.

Republicans now control 31 governorships. Obama was elected as a sitting senator, but usually governors, former governors or vice presidents win.
"That executive experience has to make you a more attractive option," Skelley said. "Governors have a track record for executive decision-making."

The GOP has governors in several key battleground states, including Florida and the Midwest's Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan. It even has the governor's mansion in deep-blue Illinois and Iowa.

It's not a real surprise that the early GOP front-runners for the 2016 presidential nomination are Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

But it gets worse. Democrats don't just lack a bench. The bench lacks a bench.

The GOP now controls 68 of the country's 98 legislative chambers, excluding Nebraska's officially nonpartisan unicameral legislature. That's a gain of 30 chambers since the end of 2008. Republicans hold the most slate legislative seats since the 1920s.

As a result, the Democrats' pool of potential future governors and U.S. senators is historically low. That suggests that the ranks of attractive Democratic presidential contenders will be thin for years to come, even if the party starts to reverse its down-ticket losses.... KEEP READING

Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn’t been seen in public since March 5, and depending on whom you ask, he’s either dead, has had a stroke, has cancer, is being overthrown in a palace coup, or, contrary to his spokesperson’s denials Friday, has been out of the public eye because he has fathered a lovechild.

“Information that a child has been born to Vladimir Putin is not true,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Forbes Russia. “I am planning to appeal to people who have money to organize a competition for the best journalistic hoax,” he added.

After days of rumors that mysteriously missing Russian President Vladimir Putin was sick or dodging a coup, a Swiss paper is reporting that the leader was in Lugano for the birth of his love child. The paper Blick said uber-playboy Putin and his alleged paramour Alina Kabayeva, 32, a former Olympic gymnast, welcomed their baby in a private clinic in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, The Daily Beast reported. A Swiss radio station reported that Putin reserved two rooms at the fancy clinic—one for the new mommy and another for their bodyguards.

When the Washington Post asked Brown about it on Friday, “Brown said he is not convinced the issue is a passing storm, as many other Democrats contend.”

“I don’t know that,” Brown said. “With these things, what makes a difference, you often don’t know until it unfolds because nothing is just what it is. It’s always in part of a larger context. Things unfold and things happen.”

As the New York Times noted, Democrats, who believe Clinton is “too big to fail” and their inevitable nominee, have been put in the unenviable position of defending Clinton’s many scandals....

The New York Daily News denounced senators opposed to an Obama deal giving Iran the ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons as “Traitors”. The administration’s social media allies’ hashtag dubbed Republicans opposed to Iran’s nuclear weapons as #47Traitors.

Traitors oppose terrorists getting nuclear weapons. Patriots like Joe Biden not only support it, but they blast a president trying to stop it while collecting $30,000 at a pro-Iranian fundraiser.

But the Elizabethan courtier left out that when traitors rule, patriotism becomes treason. Obama commits treason and taunts his critics as traitors.

Republicans who want to see American leadership rise to the challenge of ISIS and Iran are accused of collaborating with ISIS and Iran by an administration that willfully lied and misrepresented the growth of ISIS for as long as it could and that is now doing the same thing for Iran’s nuclear threat.

Associated Press president Gary Pruitt reported in an op-ed on government transparency that, during the course of an AP investigation into Michelle Obama’s dresses, NARA used a privacy exemption to redact a line in an email that was actually about the agency’s fear of the White House:

As the president said, the United States should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing.

But it happens anyway.

In government emails that AP obtained in reporting about who pays for Michelle Obama’s expensive dresses, the National Archives and Records Administration blacked out one sentence repeatedly, citing a part of the law intended to shield personal information such as Social Security numbers or home addresses.

The blacked-out sentence? The government slipped and let it through on one page of the redacted documents: “We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH (White House).”

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails,” the White House said in a 2009 memo to all federal agencies. “The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

“This is an administration that seeks to legislate [what] is not in their purview: whether it be immigration…healthcare…or a war that has now been going on eight months without Congressional authorization,” said Paul pointedly.

“This administration is in direct defiance of what Sen. Obama ran on, what he was elected upon,” said Paul. Obama “said ‘no country should go to war without the authority of the Congress unless under imminent attack.’”

Paul: “I signed the letter to Iran, but you know what? The message I was sending was to you. The message was to President Obama. We want you to obey the law. We want you to understand the separation of powers.”

47 Senate Republicans signed an open letter to Iran this week that said: "we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khomenei."

Paul continued: “So why do I sign this letter [to Iran]? I sign this letter to an administration that doesn’t listen. To an administration that every turn tries to go around Congress because you think you can’t get your way. The president says ‘oh the Congress won’t do what I want, so I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone, I’m gonna do what I want.’”

“The letter was to Iran, but it should have been CC’ed to the White House, because he needs to understand that any agreement that removes or changes legislation will have to be passed by us,” said Paul.

Finally, a debate about Iran. Last week, 47 Republican senators released a public letter addressed to the leaders of the Iranian regime. The letter made what might have seemed a self-evident point: If the Obama administration reaches a deal with Iran, Congress will not be bound by parts of the deal to which it has not assented.

...The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

One argument made against the FCC’s regulatory push is that the general public is largely happy with its internet service. Support for net neutrality was seen as the domain of special interest groups like Free Press.

The activist group has big money behinds its effort. It has received $2.2 million in donations from progressive billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and $3.9 million from the Ford Foundation.

And one of Free Press’ co-founders, Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has not been shy about his desire to see the internet regulated heavily....

But internet regulation appears to be only part of McChesney’s more radical agenda of completely revamping how the media operate in the U.S.

“In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles,” McChesney wrote in a 2009 essay.

“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism,” he said.

“The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society. Once we accept this, we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want,” McChesney once argued.

Sentiments such as these have raised questions about whether the FCC’s new regulations will eventually lead to oversight of internet content.

“The unthinkable has become thinkable, and the free-market Internet – one of freedom’s greatest triumphs – is set to be reduced to a public utility, subject to pervasive economic regulation and, in turn, to content control,” American Commitment’s Kerpen wrote in an open letter to McChesney after the FCC voted 3-2 in favor of the regulations.... KEEP READING

Although we all talk about Hillary’s EmailGate, we shouldn’t forget that this controversy actually started with Lois Lerner. When Republicans tried to find out whether the IRS had purposefully targeted conservative organizations, this former head of the Internal Revenue Service said her email had suddenly disappeared.

And then came in Hillary, who, the Benghazi Select Committee says, didn’t hand over all her emails and who used a personal, rather than a government email address to conduct official business, everything related to the attack on the embassy in Benghazi, Libya, included. Again, important information is being hidden from the American people.

Lastly, we now have Attorney General Eric Holder who has used not one, not two, but three email aliases. He maintains all records have been kept, but whether that’s true is anyone’s guess.... ◼ KEEP READING

To see how I think it might matter, it’s worth thinking back to 2008, and why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to a relatively inexperienced challenger. Barack Obama running a pitch-perfect campaign mattered a lot, as did Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War.

Her problems, however, went deeper. To start, she’s not a natural politician. Remember, the wheels started to come off the campaign bus for her in 2008 after her answer to this question on driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. It’s still hard to watch the exchange without cringing. Her speeches tended to be wooden and forced. She didn’t exude warmth.

...It is undisputed that Clinton did not take the steps that are required before documents may be removed from Department custody. In fact, it is undisputed that the deleted emails were never in the Department’s custody.

For that matter, the emails that Clinton didn’t destroy were not in State’s custody for a period of about two years following her departure from the Department. This too is a violation, Coffin notes. Thus, the case that Clinton committed the felony of willfully and unlawfully concealing and/or destroying records seems strong....

Clinton apologists from within and outside of the State Department have made the point that by turning over 55,000 pages of emails to department officials, critics should be placated. So then in order to diffuse the controversy, why doesn’t Clinton simply release the records she already turned over? To do so “would highlight the fact that Clinton’s own aides and lawyers determined which records were work-related,” Politico surmises. That is putting it charitably.

There seems to be an assumption that the account(s) at issue are her “personal” accounts. On the contrary, these accounts, which were set up by the Secretary of State to conduct government business, are alias government accounts and should be treated as such. No third party reviews, as some are suggesting, are necessary if State follows the law and treats the account(s) as it would any other State.gov account. The State Department is obligated to secure the accounts as soon as possible to protect classified materials, retrieve any lost data, protect other federal records, and search records as required by court orders in our various FOIA lawsuits, and in response to congressional subpoenas, etc.

Rather than her private lawyers/campaign advisers reviewing the accounts and releasing material to the government, the agency should assert its ownership, secure the material, and prohibit private parties from illicitly reviewing potentially classified and other sensitive material.

In fact, the press has been publicly entertaining this scenario since the revelations regarding Clinton’s emails were disclosed. But the GOP’s unusual message discipline and reserved silence with regard to Clinton’s email controversy has frustrated those in the commentary class for whom Republican tactical errors are as predictable as the tides. Distraught, some in the press are now placing their hopes on the one Republican who has consistently failed to overreach, despite the fact that Democrats and the press have provided him with miles of rope with which he was expected to hang himself.

DRUDGE:
HARD DRIVE DESTROYED?
NOTHING CLASSIFIED? REALLY?
Said she emailed with Bill...
BUT spokesman claims he only has sent two in his life... Circus back in town...
Media Demons Return To Haunt...
Huma and Cheryl Mills used private emails at State...
NORMAN LEAR TURNS...
VIDEO: Wacth her age 50 years in 60 seconds...
FLASHBACK: Deputy independent counsel says he wrote 'rough draft indictment' of Hillary...
FLASHBACK, MICHAEL KELLY: I BELIEVE IT ALL...

Tell a big fat stinkin’ lie.
See if anybody buys it.
If so, move along to the next lie. If not, do a complete 180 while claiming it’s what you’ve said all along.

As always, Obama lied when he said he didn’t know about the wrongdoing under his administration until he saw it on the news. Usually, these claims of incompetence are brushed aside by our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media. “He’s the smartest president ever, yet he has no idea what’s going on? Seems legit!” He’s just that awesome.

However, the gatekeepers seem to be taking an unusual interest in this story, even though the people brazenly lying to them are their fellow Democrats. So maybe they’ll keep asking questions. Maybe they’ll risk being called racists. Maybe they’ll extract something resembling the truth out of these corrupt slimeballs. And maybe everybody will finally realize that when Obama says “transparency,” he means the other thing.

◼ 4 reasons the Hillary emails are hurting Obama - Brian Hughes/Washington Examiner @BrianHughesDC
The White House insists that Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a private email account as secretary of state is not President Obama's problem.

Already, that logic has been punctured.

With each passing day that Clinton chooses to stay silent on why she kept her digital correspondence private, the White House is forced to answer questions on her behalf.

White House aides are clearly frustrated that Obama has gotten engulfed in the controversy with so little time before the entire political conversation turns to 2016.

Yet Obama's problems have only compounded since his messaging team tried to sidestep blame for the latest uproar surrounding secretive Clinton tactics.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

...To a substantial extent, these compensation premiums are driven by the rising costs of public employee pensions and healthcare. In Los Angeles, pension costs have risen to nearly 20% of the city's budget from 3% in 2000. Statewide pension liabilities are increasing at a rate of $17 billion a year, which make the state's current cash surplus a mirage.

As the city and state pay more for public services they've already consumed, there are fewer resources left for other public priorities. Government ends up spending more but doing less, which is a governing formula that pleases neither liberals nor conservatives.

The media, who have an interest in slandering Republican presidential candidates, took Carson’s poorly-articulated answer and used it to slam him repeatedly over the weekend, with Saturday Night Live leading the way, mocking Carson over and over again. But that was nothing compared to the typically vile output of supposed anti-bullying advocate Dan Savage. After laying out a typically illogical complaint comparing the merit of homosexual activity to that of religious living, Savage then stated:

Dear Dr. Carson,

If being gay is a choice, prove it. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that’s done, Ben, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick. Name the time and the place and I’ll bring my dick and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument.

“The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time,” stated the letter, initiated by Sen. Tom Cotton, a freshman Republican from Arkansas.

Responding to Obama’s jibe about a coalition with “the hardliners in Iran,” Cotton said later, “There are nothing but hardliners in Iran, nothing but hardline Islamic extremists who’ve been killing Americans around the world for 35 years.”

“That’s why Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“If they’ve been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for 35 years, imagine what they will do if they have a nuclear umbrella.”

Democrats are pushing back against the letter, circulated by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and signed by 47 Senators in all, that warns the Iranian regime that any deal it signs with President Barack Obama could be voided by the next president if it is not ratified by the Senate under the U.S. Constitution. They have enlisted Vice President Joe Biden and even retired Sen. Richard Lugar to disparage the effort. In so doing, they have proved Cotton’s point–and checkmated the administration.

Shorter: Time after time, Obama has told Congress to go to hell. Now Congress is telling Obama to go to hell. http://t.co/slTGVCPsos

Some media outlets and gun control advocated responded to the report by claiming Loughner’s successful passage of a background check simply proves the background check system isn’t sufficient. But those making this argument miss a very important point: Namely, that Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, was turned away twice on gun purchases in 2013 because of certain requirements and stipulations of the current background check system.

Breitbart News previously reported that Kelly went to Tucson, Arizona’s Diamondback Police Supply in February 2013 to show that “background checks are easy.” Kelly brought in a Texas ID instead of an Arizona ID and was denied because the current background check system stipulates that you can only purchase a handgun in the state within which you reside.

Kelly returned with an Arizona ID 13 days later and passed the background check for a 1911-style handgun. He then released a hidden-camera video of how easy it was to purchase the gun but made no mention of the fact that his first attempt was refused.

Last year, Breitbart News reported that Kelly’s highly-publicized AR-15 purchase was terminated as well. Kelly made such a show of his attempt to buy the rifle — telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer his plan was to hand the gun over to someone else all along — that Diamondback Police Supply owner Douglas MacKinlay cancelled the purchase and refunded Kelly’s money.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said the Wisconsin bill is the latest in a “sustained, coordinated assault on unions” led by the wealthy and their friends in government, predicting it will hamper economic growth and harm the middle class moving forward.

But he saved his harshest words for Mr. Walker, a potential 2016 presidential candidate and rising star in the Republican party.

“Wisconsin is a state built by labor, with a proud pro-worker past. So even as its governor claims victory over working Americans, I’d encourage him to try and score a victory for working Americans by taking meaningful action to raise their wages and offer them the security of paid leave,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s how you give hardworking middle-class families a fair shot in the new economy — not by stripping their rights in the workplace, but by offering them all the tools they need to get ahead.”

Mr. Walker shot back and said the president could learn lessons from states such as Wisconsin.

“On the heels of vetoing Keystone Pipeline legislation, which would have paved the way to create thousands of quality, middle-class jobs, the president should be looking to states, like Wisconsin, as an example for how to grow our economy,” he said in a statement. “Our reforms are moving Wisconsin forward and helping create family-supporting jobs for people in our state.”

Unions and the think tanks they fund are in an understandable panic. History shows that when workers aren’t forced to pay union dues and fees, they usually choose not to.

A right-to-work law does not prohibit unions. There are active, powerful unions in right-to-work states. This law simply gives individual workers the freedom to choose whether to financially support a union as a job condition.

Mr. Earnest also said that all of Mr. Obama’s emails have been properly preserved in accordance with federal record-keeping requirements. As a result, all of Mr. Obama’s emails with Mrs. Clinton have been saved, Mr. Earnest said.

Aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest indicated that President Obama probably found out about the Hillary Clinton email scandal from “the newspaper.” Earnest admitted he had “no idea” when Obama learned that Clinton was exclusively using a private email account based on a home server but that he “wouldn’t be surprised, however, if he had learned about that by reading the newspaper.”

Those problems have led some in the embattled party to conclude that the California GOP is in need of a rebranding, perhaps going so far as to de-emphasize the “R” affiliation in upcoming campaigns....

In a campaign that could emphasize stagnant wages and improvements to education — and not the divisive social issues Republicans have so frequently emphasized — “I won’t be going around with an 'R’ on my forehead,” Sundheim said.

State Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, a Republican from Oceanside (San Diego County) who announced his run for that Senate seat on Thursday, said, “The way that we’re going to win is that ... we’re not going to run a Democrat-Republican race. We’re going to run a California race.”

...“I don’t accept what Republicans have been doing for the last six years” in Washington, he said. Del Becarro said he believes President Obama acted unconstitutionally in issuing an executive order on immigration that has since been put on hold by the courts and which Republicans in Congress tried to tie to the Homeland funding, but he argued the party has failed to make its case. Last year, “Republicans won the (midterm) election ... but they’re not going out and talking to the American people.” KEEP READING

The unidentified mother showed up at Brookshire Elementary to pick up her daughter because she wanted to opt the fifth grader out of a Common Core-aligned writing test.

School officials informed the mother that they would not allow her daughter to leave, according to the mother as well as a second parent, Jacqui Myers, who was at the school.

Myers, the parent of a first-grade student, was on the scene at Brookshire Elementary because she is politically active in the local movement to opt students out of Common Core-mandated tests.

“They’re not giving me my child, can you help?” the mother of the fifth grader told Myers, according to the Sentinel.

Myers responded by calling 911.

An emergency responder notified police. The Winter Park Police Department dispatched a school district resource officer to Brookshire Elementary.

Brookshire principal Susan Mulchrone then arranged for the fifth-grade girl to appear in the school’s administrative office so she could leave with her mother, according to school district spokeswoman Shari Bobinski. KEEP READING

It was supposed to be a carefully planned anniversary to mark one of the most important and widely praised moments in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career — and to remind the country, ahead of a likely 2016 presidential campaign, about her long record as a champion for the rights of women and girls.

Instead, as Mrs. Clinton commemorates her 1995 women’s rights speech in Beijing in back-to-back events in New York, she finds herself under attack for her family foundation’s acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.

This was not how she intended to reintroduce herself to American voters.

Mrs. Clinton’s glide path to a likely April announcement that she will seek the presidency was built around women’s issues. Advancing women has been her central life’s work, as she and her admirers say proudly; she made it a priority as secretary of state and focused on it as a philanthropist. But that focus also allowed Mrs. Clinton, who played down her gender in 2008, to frame her second attempt at the White House in what could be one way to make it special and new: as a shot at history for her and for all women.

And for someone who has so long been lampooned, and demonized on the right, as overly calculating, playing up her gender as a strength would also allow her to demonstrate her nurturing, maternal — and newly grandmotherly — side to voters whom she may have left cold in the past.

Even her most strident critics could not have predicted that Mrs. Clinton would prove vulnerable on the subject.

But the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars in donations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Algeria and Brunei — all of which the State Department has faulted over their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues.

Welcome

I would like to introduce myself. I am John Schutt the new chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee. I'd like to ask each one of you to send me your thoughts and ideas on making Humboldt great again. I also am asking for your help, need republicans for open spots on the central committee, committee seats, letters to the editor writers, and many other opportunities. The 2018 election for governor and other seats is just around the corner and we will need all your help. Please feel free to call the office (442-2259) or leave a message here (or on Facebook) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.